Mudhoney

Directed by Russ Meyer.

1962. Not Rated, 92 minutes.

Cast:

Hal Hopper

Antoinette Cristiani

John Furlong

Frank Bolger

Lorna Maitland

Rena Horten

Princess Livingston

Sam Hanna

Stuart Lancaster

Nick Wolcuff

Lee Ballard

Often, a movie is only as good as its villain. Mudhoney has a very good villain. His name is Sidney (Hopper). He’s a mean drunk that gets into fights at the local whorehouse whenever they refuse to give him freebies. After all, he is a loyal customer. Eventually, he staggers home, smacks around his wife, Hannah (Cristiani), and even rapes her. Against her father’s wishes, she stays with him, clinging to memories from when he was a better man. Sidney, on the other hand, is only hanging around because he, through Hannah, will inherit the farm they live on once his sickly father-in-law, Lute (Lancaster), kicks the bucket. He intends to sell it for all he can as soon as the old man’s body goes cold.

Since Sidney is no help with the upkeep, Hannah and her dad hire Calif (Furlong) as a live-in farmhand. Lute doesn’t want to hire him, mostly because of possible friction with Sidney. However, he likes Calif even though he’s picked up on the fact that the young man is fresh out of prison. It also becomes clear pretty quickly that Calif and Hannah have the hots for one another. They both respect her vows, but Sidney senses their obvious attraction. He takes every opportunity to antagonize Calif and remind him that Hanna is his woman.

Knowing this is a Russ Meyer film, I was ill-prepared for what I saw. I thought I was going to see a campy exploitation flick with outlandish scenes played for laughs and filled with large-breasted women badly reading sexually suggestive dialogue. That’s the director’s M.O. as I’ve encountered it. Instead, I saw a thoughtful, solidly directed morality tale that may have been ahead of its time. In other words, this is a genuinely intriguing movie.

I have to be completely honest, though. Mudhoney does have plenty of the elements I expected to get. Almost all of them involve the whorehouse, run by Maggie Marie (Livingston). Her only two workers are her daughters Clara Belle (Maitland), who talks a lot and Eula (Horten), who is ridiculously gorgeous but literally can’t talk at all. They don’t really add anything to the story. Their main function is to kick Sidney out when he gets too rowdy, provide us with a physical embodiment of his evil side and give us gratuitous nudity. Princess Livingston’s performance as Maggie Marie is akin to chalk screeching across a blackboard. Youngsters, if you’ve never experienced this youtube it, or something, with the sound up. It’s something that can’t (yet) be replicated on a dry-erase or smartboard. Aside from her, the acting as a whole leaves something to be desired. The dialogue is hammy at times, always lacking subtlety.

Flaws aside, perhaps even because of them, Meyer has crafted an entertaining, slyly poignant film. I’m certainly not suggesting this is among the era’s great movies. However, I will say it’s a step above the B-movie madness much of his canon gives us. He establishes characters we can root for and against. While each is merely a type and not a fully realized being there is some depth to our main players, some gravity to their situations. Whether by accident of him being prolific or somehow on purpose, Meyer has crafted a pretty solid flick.

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

Directed by Russ Meyer.

1965. Not Rated, 83 minutes.
Cast:
Tura Satana
Haji
Lori Williams
Sue Bernard
Stuart Lancaster
Dennis Busch
Paul Trinka
Ray Barlow

The title Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! doesn’t inspire thoughts of artsy fartsy cinema. I didn’t pop this in expecting a thoughtful examination of the human condition. If the title weren’t enough of a hint, it is a Russ Meyer film, after all. Entertaining junk is what I wanted. Entertaining junk is what I got. By the way, when I say “pop this in” I mean into the VCR. Couldn’t even find the darned thing on DVD or on the internet.

For those unaware, Russ Meyer is pretty much the father of the sexploitation flick, directing over 20 such movies in his career. They’re cheap, campy and exploitive. However, there is a certain passion that bleeds through the craziness. He wrote, directed and produced all of his own movies which were made on shoestring budgets. Pretty clearly, every warped moment leapt from the confines of his brain and plastered themselves on film. Yes, they objectify women. However, it’s atypical of the what that implies. In Meyer’s work, that generally means portraying the female gender as dominant, supremely confident and comfortable in their own skin. These are big, bad broads.

Big is a term that can be used to describe Meyer’s artistic vision. That vision and its description absolutely includes breasts with the emphasis on big. He’s obsessed with them. FPKK is nothing, if not a barely restrained display of that obsession. It’s only restrained at all because of when it was made and what he was trying to do. In 1965, nudity was impermissible if you wanted to have your movie seen by a “respectable” audience. Indeed, Meyer wanted to expand beyond the nudie circuit of which he was a star auteur. Therefore, in place of all-out nakedness we get lower than low cut, tighter than tight tops hosting a jiggle-fest of epic porportions.

Handling a rather healthy chunk of the jiggling is Tura Satana as our most voluptuous villain Varla. If you ever have the chance, read up a bit on Ms. Satana. As outlandish as her character is, her life seems to have been even more so. Allegedly, she survived a gang-rape at a very young age, learned martial arts and exacted revenge on her tormentors. She worked as a burlesque dancer at like 14, became involved with Elvis Presley at some point and turned down his marriage proposal. Trust me, I’m only skimming the surface. There’s lots more. One look at her outfit here informs us it must’ve taken an act of God for her not to have a massive flop-out every time she made a sudden move. By sudden I mean those unexpected things us humans do, like breathing. And I do mean massive in the most literal sense of the word.

The second most buxom babe is Rosie, played by the singularly named Haji. Finally, there’s Lori Williams as Billie. She doesn’t have nearly the bra size of her two co-stars but ably depicts another of Meyer’s fetishes. She has the kind of curves we normally only see on cartoon characters. By the way, she also had a relationship with Elvis. I guess it really is good to be the king.

Our three ladies are a trio of vicious vixens. By night, they’re go-go dancers. By day they drive fast, yell at each other and have the occasional catfight. In between all this, some square and his girlfriend invade their space. One thing leads to another and the square ends up in a fistfight with Varla. Bad move. She literally kills him with her bare breasts, um – I mean hands. The vivacious villains then kidnap the girlfriend since she’s the only witness and sorta go on the run. They wind up at the secluded house of a dirty old paraplegic after hearing from a gas station attendant that the man has a bunch of cash stashed on the property. The man lives with his two sons, one of whom is mentally challenged, to say the least. This little bit of info comes after one of the best exchanges in cinematic history. The attendant is leaning into Varla’s car window, telling her how he wants to get away and “see America” while staring intently at her cleavage. She snaps at him, “You won’t find it down there, Columbus!”

The story is only mildly interesting and unintentionally funny in spots. It’s the sexual innuendo filled dialogue and outrageousness of the situation that keeps us locked in for much of the runtime. That and the jiggling, of course. The conduit for both is the insanely and deliciously over the top performance by Satana. She snarls and screams nearly every one of her lines, barking orders and double entendres alike. All the while her boobs defy the laws of physics by bouncing around like basketballs but somehow not falling out of her barely there blouse. Alas, I’ve said too much. I’ll sum it up by saying it’s so bad, it’s awesome!

MY SCORE: -10/10